It's the end of day one at my first ISTE conference. It's been incredible to experience such a large conference in my home town. I started the day with a seemless registration experience, having plenty of time to walk around the conference center before the first session I attended.

To warm up, I attended a Gizmos and Gadgets session, nerding out on both education and non-education related technology. I found myself totally geeking out about some exciting tech. I immediately put Game of Phones, the Amazon Echo, the Amazon Dash Button and the Amazon Dashwand on my wish list.

Next, I got to connect with some of my peeps with the Colorado Educator Network along with some fellow DPS employees. Being a local conference, it's great to see so many familiar faces. This is incredibly helpful for an introvert like myself.

This leads to the last main event of the evening - the Keynote from Dr. Michio Kaku. While I agreed with many of the sentiments expressed in the presentation, I found myself ultimately disappointed. The overall message was fantastic - dreaming of a new world with incredible technology in the areas of healthcare, education and communication. It is absolutely astounding what advances we are likely to make in the next 50 years. This vision was impressive and inspiring. However, while visuals are not everything in a presentation, I was surprised by the large amount of text on the slides along with some low-resolution images. I felt like it detracted from the overall message. More importantly, I found myself waiting for a call-to-action and a more explicit connection to the field of education. Many references were made in the context of the medical field, but I found myself wanting to know how we could expect education to change over the next 50 years.

Throughout the day, I found myself re-organizing apps for my conference experience, being mindful of how I will collect information in a way that will make me likely to access it in the future. I plan to take a lot of pictures, blog a little each day, and engage on Twitter.

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​How was your first day at ISTE? If you had a call to action for conference attendees, what would it be? Please feel free to leave your ideas and feedback in the comments! Looking forward to connecting with more awesome people tomorrow!!